«Huarpes no tan huarpes» y «hombres modernos»: interpelaciones étnicas y disputas por las últimas tierras irrigadas en Mendoza (Argentina).

Based an ethnographic study on the periphery of the largest and most important irrigated area in central-western Argentina, this paper analyzes the role of persistent ethno-racial and environmental representations that delineate irrigated areas and social groups that possess water and land. The groups located on either side of the most distant irrigation canals are interpellated from modernist paradigms that link water rights, private property, and wine production to European heritage and the idea of progress, while in the non-irrigated area, communal land ownership and pastoralism is associated with indigenous groups of Huarpe descent and the idea of backwardness or regression. Given the fact that both groups are represented as supposedly independent, opposed and separated by the last irrigation canals, this article conceptualizes the latter as an irrigated border. This border, despite being regarded as natural and fixed, is on the contrary artificial and dynamic. It is the product of social and symbolic struggles for water and legitimacy as the socio-cultural group capable of obtaining and controlling water. In this way, not only is the presence of liminal actors who are neither of Huarpe nor European origin highlighted, but also alliances that may lead to the reconfiguration of irrigated areas and sociocultural groups capable of fighting in disputes over natural resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]